THE BLIND REVIEWER

In Which We Look Back At Books We Loved But No Longer Have

Thomas Harris

Doorjamb Pinball Wizard: Pat Black

Thomas Harris wrote grim, scary novels about serial killers. His most famous creation, Hannibal Lecter, has become one of the most beloved monsters in popular fiction. He’ll nibble yer nubbins.

Harris hit the big time with Red Dragon (1981), introducing us to the dark, brooding FBI agent Will Graham. He’s in early retirement, an enforced career curtailment after he was filleted by the renowned psychiatrist, Hannibal Lecter. Graham had a nasty encounter with the business end of a carpet knife after discovering that the doctor’s renowned culinary skills cut a little close to the bone.

Graham is called in by his old boss at the FBI to trace a killer known as the Tooth Fairy who breaks into family homes, kills everyone inside and then indulges his baroque fantasies at leisure.

Graham has a knack of finding such maniacs. It’s like a superpower – something in his mind which parallels that of a psychopath, his intuition closely matching their motivations.

The agent’s ongoing mental instabilities have a cause which goes beyond his trauma at the hands of Dr Lecter; Graham, as that articulate, cultured maniac recognises, is good at catching killers because he suffers from the same kind of compulsions as they do.

I’ve read Red Dragon twice, but it’s indistinguishable from the Michael Mann adaptation Manhunter to me. A very good film, but so eighties it hurts. Cue shots of William Petersen as Graham, staring moodily into the pale blue morning light, his face reflected in windows… backed by eighties synth.

Red Dragon has lots of big “thriller” moments, but its true horror is in its forensic detail of crime scenes. It’s well-researched, possibly in finer grain than we need. We don’t read about the initial crimes taking place, but we see their aftermath, up close. We go into the cold calculations needed to triangulate victims, motive and murderer. While the bodies are reduced to a forensic puzzle, Harris puts the victims’ humanity back into the book through the device of home-movies the families shot just before they were killed. Graham pores over these tapes of birthday parties and barbecues obsessively, trying to spot what might have attracted the Tooth Fairy.

There’s also a loathsome journalist, Freddy Lounds, who is enticed into helping out with the FBI’s investigation. Lounds’ fate was particularly interesting to me, given that Thomas Harris worked with the AP press agency for a number of years.

Red Dragon is not a whodunnit. We meet the killer, Dolarhyde, fairly quickly. When Dolarhyde meets a blind woman who takes a shine to him, something resembling humanity emerges. This doesn’t quite work. In reality someone like Dolarhyde would see Reba McClane as just another object to control and manipulate, and ultimately destroy. It was a sentimental touch from the author, a hint at something like personal redemption for his monster, something tragic. It’s contrived, and when Dolarhyde takes the blind woman to hug a tiger while the beast is under anaesthetic, it becomes clumsy.

But I can’t blame Harris for taking this turn. Everyone craves a little bit of light in something so appallingly dark.

The climax to the novel is a true shocker. Neither movie adaptation had the bottle to go through with it. If you remember Manhunter, you’ll recall Graham’s character diving through windows, his gun roaring with magic explosive bullets to kill the beast. Brett Ratner’s remake/reimagining/retread/reflux from a few years ago with Edward Norton ran very close to Harris’ original ending, but didn’t have the nerve to go all the way.

In both filmed versions, the brave knight slays the dragon, or helps to. Nietzsche quote epigram. Fade to moody blue.

Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon takes a different tack. Graham’s a victim, not a hero. It remains a deeply unsettling finale.

Red Dragon introduced Hannibal Lecter – polydactylous, maroon-eyed, a psychiatrist by day but a cannibal by night. He’s a caged beast, taking pleasure in taunting Graham from his cell. He even has a hand in the events that lead to the bloodbath in the beach house, ingeniously tipping off Dolarhyde, his former patient, as to where Graham lives. Lecter is the puppetmaster supreme.

The not-so-good doctor was a terrific supporting character, and arguably began a trope in Hollywood where heroes have a dialogue with an imprisoned antagonist (this appears again and again in superhero films). It’s a neat way of allowing deadly enemies to interact without recourse to fights or firearms.

Small wonder Harris returned to Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs (1988). From there, we might say his work went viral. It doesn’t hurt that a brilliant, and faithful, Hollywood adaptation appeared soon afterward, hoovering up Oscars left and right, giving an already successful book a kind of immortality.

Lambs follows FBI trainee Clarice Starling as she seeks help with her studies, meeting Lecter in his cell in the bowels of a secure unit. We know about their encounters almost by rote, now, thanks to Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins; their verbal jousts were instantly parodied in comedy shows and spoof movies, a sure indicator of great success. It’s a long-established cliché to say, “I remember Brian Cox as Lecter in Manhunter, and he was better”, but Anthony Hopkins’ performance got the medals, baby.

Although Lecter is urbane and gives the impression of being civilised, I can’t say that The Silence of the Lambs gave any hint that he is a romantic hero. He has a priggish concept of manners and propriety which wouldn’t be amiss in Downton Abbey. But for all that, he’s still a guy who butchers and eats people for a laugh.

Structurally, though, the narrative leans towards Lecter being a protagonist this time, not an antagonist. In tandem with Starling’s hunt for another maniac - the flaying/needlecraft expert Buffalo Bill - this story also looks at Lecter’s attempts to manipulate the system that contains him, and ultimately escape. It becomes his story as much as Starling’s.

This is similar to something I noticed about The Empire Strikes Back a few years ago. Vader, not Luke, is the tragic hero; searching obsessively for his lost son, letting nothing get in his way - and ultimately losing out. His dark heart’s true desire thwarted. Darth Valentino.

The Silence of the Lambs delved into psychotherapy territory – something we see again and again in the novels of the 1980s and 1990s, with characters attempting to get to the bottom of their own personalities and disorders as much as solving problems posed by the narrative. The apogee of this was Tim Burton’s Batman, its hero a walking therapy tutorial in fetish gear. In Lambs, Lecter cruelly exposes Starling’s character tics and failings, peeling away her defences as he uses scalpel-like insight to examine her childhood traumas.

Lecter takes a keen interest in Clarice beyond some latent professional curiosity. There is a note of sexuality - something that a gourmand like Lecter might pick out on the tip of his tongue - but no more than that. It flows in only one direction, if it’s present at all. You suspect that there’s a cerebral element to their dialogue that Lecter enjoys, and if a monster like him can truly feel tenderness towards another person, it’s of a strictly buttoned-up, almost Victorian variety. Lecter might well be a psychotic version of Hopkins’ character in The Remains of the Day.

In Lambs, there’s no question of these feelings being reciprocated by Starling. But that’s not to deny that some people could admire Lecter. Serial killers are notorious for drawing female attention after they’ve been found guilty and jailed. This is incomprehensible to most of us, but is undeniably true. An examination of the aberrant psychology involved might run something like this: There are some women in denial, who refuse to believe that such men could be guilty of these ghastly crimes, and seek to exonerate them. There are others who have a reforming zeal, who want to “claim” these lost souls and harness them into something better. And there are some who are simply turned on – seeing the serial killer as the ultimate alpha male in the pack, with his choice of mate.

Regardless of how true any of that is, none of these scenarios represent a mindset that we could project onto Starling with regard to Lecter.

That’s what makes the end of their story so astounding.

It’s about 16 years now since Hannibal (1999) was unleashed. Coming just before the Harry Potter hype machine really cranked up, the news Starling and Lecter would return in a sequel caused a frenzy in publishing at the time. But surely no-one, outside of grotesque fan fiction producers and consumers, could have seriously envisaged this pair ending up together.

Most people were expecting more of the same from Harris – Starling and Lecter’s paths crossing once again, a series of crimes that need solving and victims who need avenging, and then a final showdown. Not so.

Hannibal started out weird, got stranger, and ended up with a near laugh-out-loud finale. I was 23 when I read the paperback, and my first reaction to the final pages was stupefaction.

As the years have passed I’ve changed my tune. Hannibal is a masterpiece, an immense joke, a subversion of its genre, a true comedy in both form and content, and an underappreciated classic of its time.

Similar to what the late Wes Craven did to slasher films with Scream, Harris gleefully, deliberately sent up a genre he helped create. Instead of being played with or alluded to, the absurdity of Hannibal Lecter being portrayed as a hero was fully exploited. What was a mild, creepy hint in The Silence of the Lambs became the major component of the story which culminates in Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling consummating their relationship… and then dancing in the moonlight.

I can picture Harris’ initial meetings with agents and publishers, hands folded, a spotty handkerchief in his blazer pocket, eyes glittering.

“So, Tom, are we going to explore Starling and Lecter’s relationship in this book?”

“For sure.”

“And are we keeping in that hint that Lecter’s sweet on Starling?”

“Oh, I think we can manage a bit more than a hint.”

Standing ovation. What a pair of balls that took. I’ll never know how Harris got away with it. Maybe once you have an intellectual property that popular, you hold all the aces.

“I want to put Hannibal Lecter in space.”

“Sure thing, Tom. Whatever you say.”

Personally, I’d like to have seen this communion take place in an even more apt setting – the dinner table. Instead of f*cking Clarice, Lecter should have eaten her. Savouring every single morsel, taking infinite care in the preparation, agonising over what wine to use as an accompaniment. His magnum opus.

Even Ridley Scott, normally such an assured film-maker, didn’t know what to do with the property, getting his 2002 adaptation badly wrong. Jodie Foster - who, don’t forget, won an Oscar for playing Clarice Starling - stayed well away. We’ll never know if Scott wanted to film the ending as Harris wrote it, but it wouldn’t surprise me if studio bosses vetoed that idea. High-wire disembowellings, pigs eating people’s faces, flash-fried brain suppers… obviously, the violence is okay, but Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling becoming lovers and waltzing off stage like Fred and Ginger was a step too far. Leslie Nielsen, never mind Anthony Hopkins, should have taken the title role.

It comes across as a risible delusion of late-middle age; that a guy orbiting his twilight years can seem attractive to a beautiful, capable, clever woman in the prime of her life on account of his intelligence alone - ignoring some glaring deficiencies.

To be fair, there’s an element of Stockholm syndrome in Lecter and Clarice’s hook-up; a suggestion that her mind has disintegrated under conditioning and doping, with Lecter scooping up the pieces. But it was a breath-taking achievement to turn the third chapter of this very dark trilogy into an outright comedy, in form and execution.

That’s not to say Hannibal is a laugh riot. From its misty opening moments, when Lecter stalks Florence’s streets in his beautifully-cut clothes, with his perfect Italian and his imperious cultural knowledge, this king in exile is at the centre of a gothic horror. The bloody retribution carried out on the corrupt Florentine detective who figures out that the dapper professor is one of the FBI’s most wanted men is planned out from the very first page, a plot from a Poe story realised in a splash of entrails on ancient cobblestones.

From there, we meet poor old Mason Verger, one of Lecter’s former patients whom he persuaded to remove his own face after a special LSD-soaked therapy session. Verger has a twisted revenge in store – in the form of a buffet for man-eating pigs. Once news of Lecter’s whereabouts reaches Verger, a conspiracy is put in play to capture the not-so-good doctor, with Clarice Starling used as bait.

This book was sumptuous, meticulous in detail, but it has a sense of refinement and grandeur which I suspect its author failed to realise comes across as pompous. Lecter’s bilious balloon inflates and inflates and inflates, but never bursts. It’s common for superficial people – like psychopaths, I guess - to hold up something they enjoy as some kind of personal validation, whether that’s food, art, travel or, indeed, books, as compensation for their lack of human qualities. This comes across as exponentially silly with regard to Lecter.

“My god, this guy’s a one-man renaissance!”

Yeah. But he’s also a sordid, filthy murderer.

Perhaps these absurdities had to be addressed surreptitiously.

So, hats off to Thomas Harris. Had this book been about Starling and Lecter hunting each other, and then perhaps a confrontation which left Lecter dead and Starling glowering into the moody blue dawn, with some eighties synth parping away in the background… I’d have forgotten about it already.

Harris’ great joke of a novel beautifully subverts what I think is a problematic construct: Hannibal Lecter as hero. Added to this is the troubling idea that we should admire someone because they crack open a book now and again, or can recite some poetry… despite the fact they’re off-the-charts evil. It’s an entertaining book, but it also laughs in your face.

Unfortunately, not everyone got the joke. For some, Lecter may well be a hero. I’m sure Harris didn’t intend him to be as such, but if you create a monster, then some people will worship it.

Making a killer into someone to root for is problematic, if not exactly dangerous. Lecter’s not quite a cartoon character like Freddy Krueger or Jason Voorhees; his crimes are fabricated and given the exaggeration of mainstream fiction, but of course, multiple murderers are a grim reality. I think I preferred Red Dragon’s clinical examination of these monsters to Hannibal’s operatic stylings.

However, in the 15 years since I read Hannibal, the technological revolution has changed our ideas of evil in society. Hannibal Lecter, with his private mania and hidden compulsions, the bodies of his victims strewn around for detectives to solve like an Edwardian parlour game, comes across as dated. Watching The Silence of the Lambs again is like when you stumble over an old episode of Friends, and the gang’s haircuts, make-up and pop culture references look like old hat. (“I scored some tickets for Hootie and the Blowfish!”) With a jolt, you’re aware how much time has passed, how much things have changed.

Consider that in the past few weeks we’ve seen a disturbed man shoot two people dead, live on television, before broadcasting his own footage on the internet for anyone who didn’t catch it first time around. Even in the early 1990s, this activity would have been restricted to sci-fi novels. We’re into an era where murderous fantasies can be facilitated and distributed by technology within seconds of it happening. Someone, somewhere, is making money off all those clicks. We have become consumers of murder.

The blame is the same: it rests on individuals. But ever since 9/11 - the nightmare that we saw in so much detail that we can almost imagine we were actually there - grim death, terror and even the most graphic, sadistic killings are now in our faces. Sitting there, right now, you’re only a rogue search engine keystroke away from humanity’s darkest depths. Things so bad we couldn’t even imagine them, until we saw them. And it can only get worse. How long before we get a complete first-person perspective gun massacre, a video game nightmare come true?

There may come a time when we look to Hannibal Lecter’s evil as a reflection of a more innocent time. Like Dracula, he will become a safe monster, to be played with and then stored away in his box at bedtime. Someone to dress up as at Halloween. No harm done. 

THE BLIND REVIEWER:

In Which We Look Back At Books We Loved But No Longer Have

John Grisham

Most-slapped person at parties: Pat Black

Long before I learned how much fun it is to give lawyers all your money, I put John Grisham's 1990s legal thrillers in the dock.

During a strange period of my life in between my final year at school and the end of my first year at university, I emerged from a long-lasting horror novel phase into what I thought were more "varied" types of fiction. In truth these were not so much interesting books as different types of commercial fiction.

On top of genuine curiosity and a love of books, there was method in my mediocrity. I wanted to know what made these headline act novels tick, no matter what the genre. I wanted to learn how to write one.

I took a punt on The Firm (1991), moving out of my fiction comfort zone, and surprised myself by really enjoying it. Grisham’s breakthrough blockbuster showcased what I believe are the two greatest assets of any commercially successful novelist: pace and plot. 

Grisham can crank out a tale. He knows when to take a break from the main action, when to drop in a twist or two, and - I wouldn't suggest for a minute this was any consequence of his legal career - he knows how to construct a tangled, twisted storyline peopled by amoral bastards.

The Firm’s hero has a comic book name: Mitch McDeere. MM is a hotshot fresh out of grad school, having finished near the top of the class at Harvard where, like all straight-A swots, he was probably reviled. He has a beautiful wife, and is going places. He's hired by the firm in the title, and seduced with the promise of great wealth as well as the odd trip to the Caribbean for "work". 

As a scrubby 17-year-old living in a squalid tenement with utterly no prospects, I was goggle-eyed at the scenes of McDeere working out his terms of employment. "And did the man say Mercedes?"

I must confess to some rumblings of envy, and perhaps a little belch of greed. Maybe I should have done Law instead of this Arts and Social Studies nonsense, I thought to myself...

McDeere ties up his big house and fancy car, but things aren't quite what they seem at the firm. Some of his colleagues die unusually, and messily. Not quite “fall into an industrial liquidiser” unusual, but odd enough to raise an eyebrow or two.

McDeere hires a private eye to do some digging, and finds out that the firm is actually a front for a massive money-laundering operation for the mafia. McDeere appears to be at the end of a long trail of dead lawyers once attached to the company. 

Things get tastier when McDeere is contacted by the FBI, who offer him a choice not many of us would relish: snitch on the mafia and go into witness protection for the rest of your days, or remain on the inside, knowing that if you don't end up in jail, you're probably going to have an unfortunate accident. 

McDeere takes a gamble, and plays the two sides off against each other. 

Sub-plots are nicely blended in. There's McDeere's brother, a convict who helps put him onto the private investigator. McDeere's wife has a hand in stealing documents relating to the firm's illegal activities, a vital bargaining chip with the FBI. The private eye's investigations would make a great tale on their own.

There's also an intriguing moment when McDeere's McD gets the better of his McBrain on a sandy beach one starry night. This leads to horrible complications when it turns out he's been humping away on top of a buried honey trap.

These secondary elements were handled well. It's a lesson in thriller writing; that's how you keep a big novel moving. 

Most of us can only dream of how it must have felt for Grisham, selling millions of copies, knowing the book was going to be turned into a movie starring Tom Cruise, knowing he was made for life, a dazzling career up and running. It can't be too far off how Mitch McDeere feels when he's handed the keys to the kingdom. Into the great wide open, indeed. 

Great success in publishing is experienced by very few of us. Sometimes it's down to a mixture of simple luck, good contacts, Jedi-level editing, a stout advertising budget, pure hype… and already being famous. But sometimes you have to take your hat off to talent, and Grisham, in his plotting and execution, has it in the locker. 

(Talent, not my hat.) 

I returned to Grisham for The Pelican Brief (1992). This one follows a hotshot law school undergrad, Darby Shaw, who discovers that a couple of top judges were assassinated as part of a plot to force through oil drilling on environmentally-protected land, a habitat for endangered pelicans (ta-da, title!). 

As in The Firm, once the conspiracy is discovered, bodies start dropping, including Shaw's college professor (and lover). This type of "uncovered corruption" story used to feature journalists as the key guys, and Grisham acknowledges this by switching the action to a newspaper and introducing the other main character, a hack with the slightly less impressive superhero name of Gray Grantham. 

There's a siege of sorts at the newspaper offices as Darby seeks refuge under the protective wing of the free press, hoping that those silly old concepts, truth and justice, will prevail. 

This one had the same elements which helped make The Firm a hit, though its finale fizzled out rather than exploded (arguably this was The Firm's weakest point, too). It's an engrossing thriller, though. 

These are aggressively American novels. By that, I mean that they have a strong strand of the classic American Dream in their DNA. Mitch McDeere and Darby Shaw are master-swots. They come top of the class. They work incredibly hard - McDeere bills 100-hour weeks; Shaw's life is an avalanche of case files - but their rewards are in sight, and achievable. It all pays off for them. They succeed on their own merit.

I can see how my younger self was hoodwinked by this notion that if you work hard enough at anything, success must follow. This is a strangely American conceit, and of course it's absolute nonsense, in the same way as the plucky Briton who reaches the top through a mixture of luck, charm and unstructured natural talent is also total bunk.

Hard work was never a barrier to success, of course. But we know that many successful people are on the fast-track to the big time before they've even popped out of the womb, and sometimes rewards bear little relation to how hard their recipients worked.

These go-getter heroes of western capitalism with their bizarre fetish for cosmetic dentistry are very rare in UK stories. We tend to champion less obviously successful characters, and usually outright underdogs. There's something peculiar in the British national character that tends to sneer at a clever, neatly-turned-out, well-educated, ambitious person. 

I'm not saying either stance is right or wrong; every "winner" I've ever met could do with adding a bit of humility to their game. Equally, crazy, quirky people trying to bumble through life on the strength of charm, eccentricity, a nebulous concept of "natural talent" and nebbish self-deprecation could benefit from lessons in hard graft and assertiveness. 

But it's interesting to me when US and UK cultures clash. We share a language, popular culture and some traditional and ethnic elements, and there's an almost reflexive tendency to think the countries are the same, or at least close siblings. They're not.

Once The Pelican Brief had flown, my John Grisham story came to an abrupt end. I began to pay more attention to the classics, left-field literature, cult properties and generally more interesting books than what appeared in the window at WH Smith. But I did have a third bite at Grisham's tasty torts in The Brethren (2000). 

It's not one of Grisham's better-known books, but is well worth checking out. It follows three judges who've been jailed for a variety of crimes. They operate a blackmail scam from their cells, targeting well-known politicians and celebrities who are secretly gay, and extorting cash out of them for their retirement fund when they are finally released. One of their targets is involved in a political assassination, and soon they draw attention from criminals, political Mephistopheles and Machiavellis and, as before, the FBI. 

What struck me was the sheer nastiness of the plotting, the calculated way the Brethren reeled their marks in, and how skilfully they manoeuvred out of tight situations, both inside and outside jail. This is a book without heroes, and no-one to root for - just a set of bastards trying to work things out to their satisfaction. It's a tight, and surprisingly tart piece of work. 

Case closed. One thing about all these books of yesteryear: although I could make a great case for the defence of physical books, one undeniable argument in favour of e-readers is that you don't have to go far to find the stuff. In just a couple of clicks, you can have them downloaded. That can’t be a bad thing.

:: Next: The Blind Reviewer feels his way into one last review... But he might have to tread carefully. He's in a basement of some kind... 

Christ, it's all sticky in here. Is this some kind of wall? Am I stuck in a well? 

I knew I should have told someone I'd been invited to Thomas Harris' house... 

THE BLIND REVIEWER:

In Which We Look Back At Books We Loved But No Longer Have

Terry Brooks

Lamppost dodger: Pat Black

I’ll start with a confession: I read the Shannara books before I read Tolkien.

I knew all about Lord of the Rings. I'd seen the truncated Ralph Bakshi cartoon version and my older brother was somewhat obsessed with the book… Ah, but did you actually read that handsome red hardback edition, fella? I have my doubts.

But I didn't reach Middle Earth’s shores until 1995. One year earlier, I took a chance on The Sword of Shannara. 

Swords, sorcery and heroic fantasy seemed to be everywhere in the early-mid 1980s, when I was a youngster. John Milius’ fantastic Conan The Barbarian adaptation in 1982 led a slew of big budget fantasy films, ranging from blood and boobs schlock such as The Sword and the Sorcerer, to Marc Singer prancing around in a loincloth with a pair of ferrets on his shoulders in Beastmaster, to supercharged fairy tales such as Krull and Neverending Story.

In the UK, Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson’s Fighting Fantasy adventure gamebooks brought worlds of heroes, monsters and wizards closer to you – as in, second-person perspective “you”.

I found these a little bit of a ballache, though I was maybe a couple of years too young for them.

Roll one die; if you get a 6, you start to give a f*ck;

Roll a 1 to start making up your own rules;

If you get a 2, sack this nonsense off.

In America, the board-bound phenomenon of Dungeons and Dragons took off, delaying sexual experience for many players for years. And let’s not forget He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, mincing their way across children’s hour TV screens in that signature Filmation style.

It’s difficult to know where this 1980s movement started, unless we want to point fingers at Tolkien 30 years earlier. Terry Brooks’ The Sword of Shannara, which first appeared in 1977, is as good a starting point as any.

I bought a copy when I was 17, heading off on an exciting quest of my own at the end of my first year at university, to visit a friend in the magical realm of Doncaster.

I was gradually climbing out of the horror fiction hole I’d fallen into in the previous couple of years and branching out into other kinds of yarn. Having spent my first, chaotic academic year grappling with texts read out of obligation rather than desire, it was nice to cool my head in a bucket of sticky, fizzy pop.

The Del Rey doorstopper followed Shea Ohmsford’s quest to bring peace and justice to a place of mystical and heroic fantasy - the Four Lands.

Had I read Tolkien first, I might have noticed a few odd things about The Sword of Shannara. There’s a dark lord, the Warlock King. He has strange, demonic hooded servants, called Skull Bearers. The hero, Shea Ohmsford - who lives in a peaceful, somewhat lazy bucolic land called Shady Vale - is a descendant of an Elven King, and part of the House of Shannara.

Shea is entrusted with a quest by a wizard named Allanon (surely to god, that’s intentional?): to find a magical object which can destroy the Warlock King – the Sword of Shannara.

Along the way, Shea and his cousin Flick are aided by a pair of Elves who are excellent at archery, a tough, taciturn dwarf, and a swordsman who is the heir to the throne of his people. Meanwhile, in the land of Callahorn, there’s a mad king on the throne, with a dark plot to have him replaced, and -

Are you kidding me??!

The Sword of Shannara’s painfully obvious debt to Tolkien sailed over my head at the time, I’m pleased to say. I remember it as a very enjoyable novel – quests, adventure, friendship, battles, goodies, baddies, monsters, good clean fun. But there are an awful lot of similarities to novels of a Hobbitish persuasion.

To give Terry Brooks his due, Tolkien wasn’t doing anything new, either - at least, on a conceptual level. I knew of the world of Middle Earth, but I assumed that stories of warriors, wizards, dwarves, trolls, elves, dragons and evil kings were common usage for authors, as old as storytelling itself. And I was right; Tolkien didn’t invent these elements.

He took his inspiration from a variety of Celtic and Norse legends – as well as Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, much though he denied it (the same way he denied that The Lord of Rings was an allegorical retelling of World War Two and the defeat of the Nazis… yeah, pull the other one). We should never underestimate Robert E Howard’s input, either – brawnier in tone and narrower in scope, but his heroes, villains and monsters were forebears of Tolkien’s. Another tip of the hat must also go to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ ripping yarns.

So, while some riffs and rhythms in Terry Brooks’ story might seem familiar, the same was true of Tolkien’s work. It’s not fair to beat up Brooks while ignoring Tolkien as he swans through the schoolyard.

Brooks had an interesting concept for his Four Lands. The world of the Shannara books is a post-apocalyptic reclamation by nature of our own Earth, thousands of years after nuclear war has wiped away modern civilisation. Ruins and part-mechanised monsters the gang encounter in freakish wastelands point towards this, as well as some of the ancient legends bandied about by the druids.

Allanon the druid is clearly cut from the same grey cloth as Gandalf, but he’s a much sterner character, baleful and surly with his heroes as he guides them through their troubles. I liked him, but he’s also an ars*hole. It reminded me of when we finally saw the Jedi Council in The Phantom Menace. Rather than the Zen-like magicians who know the secret of existence and consciousness we were expecting, they came across as priggish, irritable civil servants. Allanon would have fit right in. (Indeed, now that I think on it, there’s a link: Terry Brooks wrote The Phantom Menace novelisation back in 1999.)

So, the characters and the story don’t fit into an exact template. That being said… when Shea is separated from his mates to complete his journey to the Skull Kingdom alone, after he seems to fall to his doom down a mountain… and then the gang encounter a dreaded monster, Valg the serpent, which crawls away after a grand battle and may or may not be dying… Yeah, you can see where a lot of Brooks’ critics are coming from.

The Sword of Shannara is a cracking romp, and sports some amazing battle scenes and good old fashioned sword n’ sorcery. I’m very curious to return to it, to see what it’s like with adult eyes. Having fun and being thrilled never gets old.

Its sequel, The Elfstones of Shannara (1982), is arguably a better book. It sees Wil Ohmsford, Shea’s grandson, taking possession of the magical stones in the title. An enchanted tree called the Ellcrys, which keeps some horrible demons in a nightmare un-world at bay by maintaining a barrier called the Forbidding, is growing sick. Wil and his companion Amberle Ellesedil are charged with a quest to find a new Ellcrys before the barrier completely fails and the world is overrun by trans-dimensional nasties.

Meanwhile, three absolute bastards are loose in the Four Lands: the Dagda Mor, an evil wizard; the terrifying and seemingly invincible Reaper, which kills everyone in its path; and a crafty Shapeshifter with designs on assassinating the king of the elves. This trio are at the vanguard of a host of demons who pour through the rift in the Forbidding, swelling the numbers of a mighty army.

I remember much more about Elfstones than I do about the original Sword of Shannara. Small wonder that the producers of a forthcoming TV series have focused on this book to start with; it is strong work, flying on its own merit without any help from more illustrious fantasy predecessors.

The Reaper sections really stick in the mind; the principal characters only just escape its clutches several times, before Wil finally confronts it. Minor characters we’d gotten to like are snuffed out in its chill clutches, and Brooks suffuses the novel with a terrible dread at the demon’s approach.

In the Dagda Mor, we have the anti-Allanon. You know they’re going to have a wizard-off, and you won’t be disappointed when they throw down with their staffs in the final battle. Add to that a shocking conclusion, and we’ve got a terrific follow-up, one of the rare few that outstrip their better-known predecessor.

The Wishsong of Shannara (1985) concludes the original trilogy. It sees Jair and Brin Ohmsford – the children of the Elfstones’ Wil – seeking to destroy an evil book, the Ildatch. Brin sings the wishsong in the title, a powerful magic apparently triggered by vocal cords. Allanon the wizard takes his 12 steps back into the land of the living after his long sleep in order to help out. Along the way they must fight the Mord Wraiths, descendants of the Skull Kingdom’s original Skull Bearers, and a terrible demon called the Jachyra. They’re aided by the usual retinue of interesting supporting characters, in particular Garat Jax, the weapons master, and an immense jungle cat. It’s not as good as the preceding book, but it brings the arc to a satisfying close, with plenty of fights, sieges, court intrigue and peril.

There’s plenty more in the Shannara series – fans have had loads to read since Brooks first began to write The Sword as an undergrad in the 1960s. I did make it through the next four books in the cycle, collectively known as The Heritage of Shannara, but aside from Walker Boh losing his arm and the Elfstones coming into play again, I’m afraid a lot of the events overlapped, or are lost to my memory. I do know I was never bored, though.

The Shannara books deserve to be rediscovered. Hopefully the new TV series will bring the novels to a new generation.

Now… I’ve got this great idea for a fantasy series, based on a dream I had.

The story involves some little guys going on a quest. They rub their powerful stones to make them glow, and when they enter the ring of power - it’s magic.

Any agents interested? Contact me at the usual address.

:: Next time: We recall a writer who managed some magical feats of his own - making lawyers interesting, and briefly stirring curiosity about a career in the law. Yes, it’s John “The Gris” Grisham! 

THE BLIND REVIEWER:

In Which We Look Back At Books We Loved But No Longer Have

Headhunter, Ghoul, Cutthroat and Ripper, by Michael Slade

Manhole diver: Pat Black

According to the author’s note, “Michael Slade” is a pseudonym for several Canadian lawyers, specialising in cases of criminal insanity.

In an effort to escape their difficult and sometimes horrifying professional lives, they constructed a series of gentle, bucolic novels about Hazey Galoshes, a farmer working in the flat English countryside, ploughing fields and loading carts with the help of his faithful donkey, Nubbins.

No, wait. That was just a dream I had.

Slade wrote horrific novels about thrill killers and the police’s efforts to catch them. When I was a teenager I read four of these books. Without re-reading them (but cheating a little with fact-checking on the net), here are my recollections.

Headhunter (1984)

Jesus, that cover.

Horror boom artwork rarely erred on the side of subtlety. In tandem with the garish thrills on offer from VHS rental boxes during this era, many of them etched their promises in blood, and lots of it. But even in a crowded field, you’d be hard-pressed to find artwork quite as disturbing as the image which illustrated the front of Slade’s debut, Headhunter.

This is one book where you can make a secure judgement based on its cover.

It’s a painting of a woman’s severed head on a stick. That’s nasty enough, but there’s something about the expression on the face, the large eyes and the bluish pallor of the skin… It’s just awful.

When we think back to when we were teenagers and the lack of sensitivity many of us had in those awkward years (perhaps I speak only for myself), it can be embarrassing, sometimes horrifying. But I can’t believe I walked out of a second hand bookshop with this paperback in my hands, and read it on a bus. Blame my dwindling thirties, or recent fatherhood, for this re-evaluation. But you can’t deny that the front cover is an absolute shocker. Apparently it sparked controversy after it featured on posters in the London Underground.

However, nasty as it is, it would be a mistake to categorise Headhunter as exploitative schlock.

Like all of Slade’s novels, Headhunter is mainly set in Canada, and features the Royal Candian Mounted Police, of red serge and strange 1980s TV series fame. Headhunter sees a maniac decapitating women in Vancouver, and taunting police with photographs of the missing heads. It’s up to retired Special X department detective Robert DeClerq to catch the killer.

Perhaps in homage to the giallo thrillers it takes for inspiration, Headhunter is part gruesome horror story, part sober police procedural. The seventies and eighties saw police using more sophisticated databases as a means of collating data to help catch criminals – such as the HOLMES system in London and the FBI’s Vicap. These form a key part of the investigations of DeClerq and his colleagues. Here, we can see the sprouting seeds of psychological profiling, mathematical analysis and computer models being used to work out patterns of offending – the place where raw science interfaces with jagged psyches. I bet you the computers and databases seem prehistoric, reading about them in this decade. Even so, gold star for homework.  

The horror element speaks for itself, and no slice is left to the imagination. But there’s a stranger section of the tale, taking in some hallucinogenic experiences a character called Sparky has in the Ecuadorian jungle. Then there’s some childhood traumas set in a New Orleans S&M dungeon, which may be the killer’s reminiscences… although you’re never quite sure until the end, when the disparate strands of the story come together.

There are pungent ingredients in the mix; psychosis, trauma, perverse sexuality, voodoo and of course, some truly disturbing murders. It all leads to a final pursuit in a snowbound setting.

Deliciously, Headhunter does not reveal its killer’s identity until the very last line. I remember being utterly wrong-footed, and having no idea who the culprit was out of its cast of suspects. Whether I’d be so easily duped nowadays is difficult to say, but I recall thinking that Slade had put together a clever package in spite of the gruesome subject matter. If you’ll forgive the expression, the author uses the head – it’s a more cerebral book than you’d think.

The RCMP’s finest were back in the sequel, Ghoul (1987). During study leave for my school exams in 1993, I lay in bed one night and read the whole thing. I finally put the paperback down at about 4am, wondering what the hell I had just read.

It would be difficult to describe Ghoul to anyone nowadays without causing laughter. Headhunter, as I said, wasn’t quite as schlocky as it appeared, but Ghoul is unashamedly so. I couldn’t see it being given such a prominent release today in high street bookshops, front and centre alongside Barbara Taylor Bradford, Wilbur Smith, Judith Krantz and Jackie Collins, as it was in the 1990s. Like a particularly debauched night out, after this book is over you’ll doubt your own recollections. Ghoul is barking mad, but it is brilliant.

Originally released in the same year Axl Rose’s pterodactyl screech was unleashed on the world in Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite For Destruction, Ghoul was inspired by the Gothic-tinged world of 1980s heavy metal. There are references to Alice Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, HP Lovecraft and premature burial. It has some astounding kill scenes, fiendish contraptions and booby traps, including a particularly sadistic home-made guillotine. Set in Canada and London, Ghoul has a complex story considering its subject matter, following a series of murders seemingly linked to the rock band Ghoul and its horror-themed stage stylings. It is cartoonish in places, but undeniably entertaining.

Our hero this time is another Mountie, Zinc Chandler – as the name suggests, more of an action man than the cerebral DeClerq - following a deep-pile red carpet of bodies. Ghoul is bonkers, seems to have been highly regarded among the horror cognoscenti and, yes, when I was 16 I loved it to pieces. It has featured in some all-time lists of dark fiction over the years, no mean achievement, although I suspect modern audiences might find its scenes of rock n’ roll theatre ludicrous compared to today’s airbrushed, streamlined pop idols. Think Anne Rice’s hilarious attempt to depict a rock concert in The Vampire Lestat.

When you discover Slade worships Alice Cooper, it begins to make more sense. Indeed, Mr Furnier decorates the inside cover with a recommendation, alongside none other than The Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden. Slade must have been cackling when he realised his rock n’ roll idols had gotten on board that crazy train.

Out of all of Slade’s output, Ghoul is the one I’d most want to revisit.

Chandler returns in Slade’s next novel, Cutthroat (1992), as does Headhunter’s crusading detective, Robert DeClerq.

The clanging sound you hear as you open this book is the kitchen sink falling out. This one has a lot going on. The set-up is almost too complicated – but then, as Slade knows from experience, what goes on in any maniac’s mind is bound to have obscure, complex, bizarre roots.

Cutthroat mimics the first novel’s dedication to historical detail, taking in the massacre at Little Big Horn and the search for a fugitive Native American by Blake, the mad Scottish Mountie whose bloodline has such nasty consequences in Headhunter. We have the hunt for one of the Big Two of cryptozoology, the Sasquatch/Yeti (alongside Nessie of course). We also have a nice cutlet of cannibalism linked to the activities of a sinister Chinese pharmaceuticals firm controlled by a modern-day warlord. The killer in the title is suffering from a degenerative brain disorder and needs a mystical “yeti” skull – the missing link between man and ape - to improve his condition, a lunatic prescription of Chinese alternative medicine.

I’m shattered, writing that. Need a rest. A cuppa tea and a sit down. There’s enough material for half a dozen books in there.

Along the way, of course, slicing and dicing ensues.

One other thing: the ending to Cutthroat was a shocker on a par with the final revelation in Headhunter. “Wait! What? No! That can’t be right!”

My final encounter with Slade was Ripper (1994), his attempt at an Agatha Christie-style isolated house/locked room mystery. It has lots of inventive kills by a pair of occult-obsessed psychopaths. As you’ve probably guessed, it takes for its historical inspiration Jack the Ripper’s handiwork, and the contrived “occult” significance which fantasists, hacks and chancers keep trying to attach to those sordid killings.

Ripper felt lightweight compared to the three previous novels, but was still a lot of fun. It sees Zinc Chandler (having survived something he probably shouldn’t have in Cutthroat) and DeClerq joining forces to chase the two crazed, but educated killers. The world of horror novels and the distaste they elicit among critics was a key part of the book. It amuses me to think of some reviewers shuffling uneasily in their easy chairs as they read about the fake novel Jolly Rodger, which contains clues to the killers’ identities. I’m sure one or two critics suffer appalling deaths. Talk about making a statement!

This one was a true giallo/slasher with typically inventive kills as the cops and supporting cast - which might include the two killers - are trapped in an isolated, booby-trapped mansion straight out of Agatha Christie.

That was my lot. I never returned to Slade.

I notice some of his paperbacks are going for silly amounts of money online. I think I might dig these out of the garage and see if I get some bites… although I may have a wee flick through them first.

In the course of my research I used Slade’s excellent website... I should warn you, though, it features some graphic images of historical crimes). In the “morgue” section he describes in fascinating detail exactly what inspired his novels – with particular reference to his childhood and career in the law, and the sometimes gruesome cases he dealt with.

We all know that police and ambulance workers have Seen Some Stuff, but we forget that people in legal circles also have to deal with visits to crime scenes and police photographer “hamburger shots”. Slade reveals that he writes out his anxiety and fears related to this gruesome stuff. Although his books may be grim, he “sleeps like a baby” and never has nightmares.

So he says, anyway.

Having gone through all this I’m still not sure who or what Michael Slade is, or if these biographical details refer to one person or several – or no-one at all. I’ve even heard that Slade is a father-and-daughter team. He, she or it remains unsettlingly vague.

They could be anyone, anywhere…  

:: Next up, we wash our hands of that nasty gloopy horror stuff, grow our hair long, put on a hot pink bandanna, pull on some green tights and sing strange songs of heroes, monsters, magic and girdles… Equally, we could just take a look at Terry Brooks’ Shannara series instead. 

THE BLIND REVIEWER:

In Which We Look Back At Books We Loved But No Longer Have

Stinger! They Thirst and The Wolf’s Hour, by Robert R McCammon

Dancer in the dark: Pat Black

For this nineties teenager who grew up polluting his mind with everything the Horror Boom had to offer, one of the biggest names to be found on the shelves of John Menzies was Robert R McCammon.

McCammon, hailing from Birmingham, Alabama (try reading that without hearing Skynyrd), was popular right in the middle of the horror gold rush lasting from the late 1970s to early 1990s. This was Stephen King's imperial phase, and everyone in publishing wanted a slice of that nice, fat pie. 

Writers such as Dean R Koontz, James Herbert, Graham Masterton, Dan Simmons, Clive Barker and others found prominence on British shelves in a way that I suspect wouldn't happen today. One man who stood shoulder-to-shoulder with them, and was easily their equal at the pounds-per-book weigh-in, was McCammon. 

Out of all the writers from this period, McCammon's career was the one I most wanted to emulate. When I dreamed of being a novelist as a boy, I used to plan out my "big novels" - sub-genres, basically, which I then tried to flesh out with hackneyed storytelling and stock characters. There'd be my Big Vampire Novel (this would very much resemble Salem's Lot... which, to be fair, very much resembled Dracula). There'd be the Big Werewolf Novel. And there'd be the Big Alien Invasion novel. They Thirst, The Wolf's Hour and Stinger! embodied these three concepts perfectly. 

All three books are very long, 450-pages plus. They're cinematic in scope, packed with action, and I sliced through them in short order. Did I read The Wolf's Hour in a single day during Easter 1992, when I should have been studying for my Standard Grades? I think I did.  

While, thank god, I got the Standard Grades, I no longer have these books. I borrowed one of them, and gave the other two away to my niece. How does my memory treat them, nearly a quarter of a century later?

Stinger! – exclamation mark very much intended - was a terrific romp, set in a US-Mexico border town called Inferno. There are two teenage gangs, and - wouldn't you know it? - one of the gang leaders falls for the sister of the rival hoodlums’ leader. Caaaapulet!! Montaguuue!!

Oh yeah... and there's the little matter of the alien who crash-lands in Inferno, chased to Earth by Stinger, another, more fearsome extra-terrestrial. 

Stinger can change shape and turn out clones, like many of the monsters who lumbered through the sci-fi B-movie classics this novel mimics. Except it can't quite disguise itself properly, allowing needle teeth, blue blood and other odd characteristics to poke through. We get plenty of tension as some of the characters are assimilated and taken over, some of whom remain hidden until vital moments; shades of The Thing (or indeed “Who Goes There?”). 

On top of that, the town is completely covered by a force shield, meaning no-one can get in or out - Stephen King, take note? - while Stinger hunts down the goodie alien (who I think has taken over the body of a young girl). This leads to a showdown over the course of 24 hours of mayhem between the teenage delinquents, united alongside the goodie alien, versus Stinger!

Yes, Stinger! 

It's nigh-on impossible to judge Stinger! on any kind of literary merit, at such a distance; but I am prepared to make the tragic admission that if I had a great time with it at age 14 or 15, then I might still find pleasure in it nowadays, guilty or otherwise. 

Partial Recall: Just off the top of my head, I can recall a motorbike chase, which I think was revealed to us in the unusual "foreshadowing" prologue chapter. There's an eerie section when we discover how Stinger manages to make copies of the villagers - and also how hard he is, when one of the cloned monsters laughs off a shotgun blast to the face, albeit lop-sidedly. 

There's plenty of aggro porn early on when the gangs knock lumps out of each other; there's a whole alien backstory, charting the beef the goodie alien has with Stinger, involving genocide and mucking up an entire species' reproductive cycle. And there's the obligatory big showdown, about which I can recall next to nothing. 

I do remember a coda scene, where a geeky boy ends up falling asleep in a bathtub with an older, glamorous local girl, and gets a peek at her boobs. All's well that perves well. 

They Thirst is one of McCammon's earliest books, and sees an ancient vampire taking over modern day Los Angeles, using a mock Gothic castle in the Hollywood hills as his power base. Our hero is a well-meaning but violent parish priest, coming on like Batman in a dog collar as he visits righteous hidings upon the hoodlums in his neighbourhood prior to getting wise to the vampire threat. The King Vampire, whose name I think is Vulkan, is a 17-year-old boy in immortal form who creates an undead army that swarms over the city. 

As with Stinger!'s force-shield, an apocalyptic event visits LA in the form of... well, I'm not sure. Either it's a storm or a tidal wave; I can't remember precisely which. But the place gets levelled, evening up the odds between the goodies and the bities. I recall how the final showdown between the fighty priest and the head vampire goes down, but I can remember precious little else about this whacking great book. Ultimately I was a little bit bored by its size and scope – disaster movies tend to get on my nerves. 

Perhaps I was finally starting to grow out of my horror phase.

Partial Recall: Basically the final showdown, which I can't talk about because, you know, spoilers... although if you've ever seen Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, you might have a wee smile to yourself. Unlike Stephen King's undead in Salem's Lot, these vampires can change shape and become dogs and bats, like Dracula. There's some sort of Renfield-esque henchman looking out for King Vamp during business hours when the sun shines, who may have been a serial killer. I can't remember any other characters. I do recollect a totally unnecessary sex scene quite early on, which might have introduced the main female character, as she has fun with a boyfriend and his buzzy little friend before they are rudely interrupted by bloodsuckers. As I said, I was about 14 when I read this. 

Last, but certainly not least, comes The Wolf's Hour. In our review of The Last Werewolf a few years back, I lamented the fact that we haven't yet had the definitive lycanthropy novel. The Wolf's Hour is the only vaguely modern book I can think of that runs Glen Duncan's teeth, guts and sarcasm classic close for the title. Set during the first half of the 20th century, it follows the fortunes of Michael Gallatin, an Allied spy parachuted into occupied Europe to take on the Nazis in 1942. 

Gallatin has a talent that puts James Bond's flame-thrower shaving foam and Cuban heel switchblades to shame: he can turn into a big bad wolf. Not a bad skill to have if you like sneaking around at night, doing secret stuff... and killing Nazis. 

The narrative splits into two, the wartime action spliced with flashback sections following Michael's adolescence in Russia as he discovers his shape-shifting abilities, becomes an outcast from his family and joins a werewolf pack. 

The separate storylines and time-shifts integrate well (not unlike Connor MacLeod's New York/Scotland scenes in Highlander). When you get bored of the wartime espionage, here's some wolf carnage in Russia; when you get tired of that, here's some wolf carnage in occupied France... Yes, more wolf carnage, please, I'm a greedy boy.

This was a book I got through in a very short time, considering its length. Gads, to look back on those years when I had time to sit and read novels in just a couple of sittings... balmy days... in which I could have been spending my time much more profitably and sociably. Hey ho. That's who I was. In fairness, I packed in a good belt of under-age drinking, too. Back then I was only a closet square; now I'm out and proud.

Partial Recall: Again, the showdowns were perfectly set-up and executed and I remember how the main baddie and his fantastic henchman, Boots, get theirs. Apart from that, I can mostly recall the rural scenes as Gallatin hunts with the pack. It's a little bit like White Fang in this respect, as Gallatin the newcomer must fight for supremacy to become top dog among the shape-shifters - not to mention gaining the right to mate. 

I also remember that Gallatin's pack gets a nasty case of lungworm, which turned my 15-year-old stomach - so it must have been particularly grim reading. 

The rest of it's gone down the memory hole. But I do know I enjoyed it, and wanted to write a book just like it. 

I'm happy to tell you that McCammon's entire backlist is currently available to buy on your Kindles and Kobos. Now in his early sixties, McCammon seems to be publishing regularly again after an apparent hiatus from the late 1990s onwards. As I lurch closer to middle age, I'm tempted to go back and take a look at his work to see if it was actually any good. I have to fight a nostalgic hankering to revisit The Wolf's Hour in particular. 

But I've got too much stuff piled up to read as it is. Our time is precious, and if it must be spent reading books then there are better ones out there more worthy of our attention. 

I also no longer want to pen big Vampire, Werewolf or Alien Invasion novels at time of writing... but, never say never.

Next time, The Blind Reviewer will try to cast his mind back to the weird and bloody work of mysterious 90s schlockmeister, Michael Slade.